A Perspective on Streaming Services

If you use the Internet to listen to music and you are, or aspire to be an audio enthusiast, you probably know about music streaming services like TIDAL, Qobuz, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora and the like. This article will focus on the first three because, in my own experience, they tend to offer the best combination of simplicity, variety, sound quality, and the most thoroughly-curated music catalogs. Your mileage may vary, and that’s OK; I only mean to offer a summary of my own personal experience over the past few years along with some hints, nudges, or just plain old-fashioned guesses about what any one reader might need or want from a few high-quality music streaming services.

First, let’s talk about what these services are not.

They are not replacements for FM radio (if you remember what that is). They all offer curated or machine-generated playlists – in fact, that’s largely Spotify’s raison d’être – but you mostly have to think of them as giant repositories of music, libraries in the sky, that give you immediate access to an enormous number of recordings via swift, easy search, with cover art, liner notes, reviews and other metadata. Although this is probably a moot point, keep in mind that you do need to have a live internet connection to use a streaming service, and, depending on the sound quality you want, anywhere from an adequate to bodacious amount of network throughput.

They won’t necessarily sound better than or even just like LP, CD or the various kinds of analog tape formats out there. It’s hard to explain why and can very complicated in some instances, but, using myself as an example, I often prefer the sound of physical media over streaming because I currently have really good disc players and only so-so streaming DACs. Even when I owned the remarkable Ayre QX-5 Twenty streaming DAC, I thought my two-box Audio Note CD player sounded better (but for a lot more money). However, as has been noted by many audio writers and listeners, the streaming rig gave me access to enormous amounts of music whenever I wanted to hear it, in very high fidelity that I could “just play” through my stereo by tapping on my iPad – all for about  $20 a month (using TIDAL HiFi at the time).

No single streaming service has everything you might want. Even if you subscribe to several and you want to hear a particular album or track, you might still have to buy physical media. At the time I write this, the 1992 CD Moodfood by Moodswings appears to be out of print and not on TIDAL or Qobuz. I had it in my well-alphabetized collection, found it, ripped it, played it. But I would have had to buy a used CD online otherwise. (It’s a little like the film Chronicle of a Summer, one of the first and best examples of cinéma verité. Until a few years ago, when Criterion released it, the film was impossible to find outside of an academic institution or maybe The Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, CA.)

All that said, both Qobuz and TIDAL offer vast, well-curated libraries of music in many genres and have a large number of software and hardware platforms with which they work well. For me, Qobuz has a more interesting collection and, using a gigabit Ethernet internet connection, potentially better sound quality for albums offered in 24/192 hi-res PCM quality, which are a subset of their total library. However, TIDAL tends to sound better to me than Qobuz at 16/44.1 PCM and also offers more current, mainstream releases, like Lemonade by Beyoncé, a really wonderful and well-produced album.

 

Roon screen shot.

The only other streaming service I tend to use (there are many) is Spotify, which is great for getting a guided tour of many kinds of music, both familiar and obscure. I’ve heard some wonderful harpsichord performances on Spotify that I would likely not have otherwise discovered. I do tend to use Spotify on the Apple TV platform so I can more easily follow the music and see the cover art, and I stream Spotify in MP3-quality because it’s just going through an Audioengine B2 Bluetooth speaker anyway. I’m not overly concerned with sound quality here; it’s a bit like listening to FM radio in the old days.

I have also tried Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the internet version of SiriusXM, to name a few others. In particular, I do like the programming on SiriusXM. For all the rest, they’re fine, no real complaints. I just find that Qobuz, TIDAL, and Spotify are enough for me. Your experience may differ, no problem!

Regarding other considerations when comparing streaming services, try to think in terms of the “use case” situations in which you commonly listen to music, and ask what problems any one service would solve for you.

Here are a few examples:

The Casual Listener

We are casual listeners most of the time. Although we enjoy music, think of ourselves as sound enthusiasts, and have no problem flipping records or changing CDs, we also like to relax, and an evening spent with Bach, Coltrane, or The White Stripes leaves us refreshed and hopefully not too stressed over how many different versions of Kind of Blue we can own.

Suggestion: TIDAL, lots of choices, generally good sound, easy to stream in “hi fi” without having super-fast Internet, not too pricey. For mainly classical listeners, consider QOBUZ as an alternative.

The Audioengine B2 Home Music System: streaming or wired stereo audio capability without breaking the bank.